Rolling Ball Exhibit (Video)
by George Rhoads
A trip to the Science Centre reveals lots of fun science, a little bad science, and a giant machine filled with rolling balls. So I made a video!
Yesterday was another hot one in southern Ontario, and I had children to entertain. The wife had lady guests coming over to the house and preferred a sans-rugrat atmosphere for the occasion, so I was politely asked if I could handle the tots myself for the day; and elsewhere.
I considered the Zoo for a bit, but soon the heat had me contemplating air-conditioned possibilities. Just then it hit me. The Science Centre, of course!* Even though I'm obviously a big fan of science, I hadn't been there since my eldest was just a year old, and I'm not sure why. Maybe at the time I'd been disappointed that my still-drooling infant wasn't sufficiently impressed by the dispersal of light through a prism, but whatever the reason, I hadn't been back in a few years.
It was time to correct that mistake. The Ontario Science Centre is a well-loved Toronto attraction to both tourists and locals alike, and I have many fond memories of visiting it as a child. It's a museum dedicated to science, and is recognized as one of the pioneers of the interactive exhibit. You don't 'look at' science at the Science Centre; you touch it. You pull on levers and feel the effects of fulcrums. You put your hands on real pieces of meteorites.
According to Wikipedia, the Science Centre's hands-on approach to science was duplicated by both San Francisco's Exploratorium and Detroit's Museum of Science and Technology. Who knows how much of an impact it had on my own childhood love of all things sciency, but I wanted to see what effect it would have on my offspring.
There were disappointments, although not as far as my kids were concerned. For 4 straight hours they ran breathlessly from exhibit to exhibit, prodding at buttons, twisting knobs, dancing through tornado chambers, staring into 3D simulations of the solar system, and marvelling at a 9 foot scale model of the Saturn V rocket. I mean, those boogers had a blast. It was just me, old man skeptic, who took issue on a few points.
A young tour guide's insistence that bodies burn up upon entry into the earth's atmosphere because of friction with the air didn't bug me too much, even though every qualified space dork knows that it's actually compression of air that does the trick. (I did not correct him, in case you're wondering) What did bug me was the Centre's new 'A Question of Truth' group of exhibits. Based on the title and some initial impressions, I hoped for a moment that the exhibits were focused on skepticism and pseudoscience, but they turned out to be an appeal to multiculturalism. In it's own words, 'A Question of Truth' asks us:
"What is your point of view? Everybody has one, including scientists. The exhibits challenge broadly-held beliefs about the differences between people and explore how those beliefs influence science."
Okay... uh, so we're talking about bias then? That's good, so long as we're using the discussion of bias to point out why the scientific method is so important. That IS what we're discussing, right?
Wait, what's that? Is that... is that a section supporting... supporting... ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE? Whatthefu??!!
'A Question of Truth' even includes a big display on acupuncture, interactive squishy pressure points and all, in an effort to make the point that we should accept the wisdom of all cultures equally. Of course, that's about as un-scientific a principle as I could possibly imagine, and I'm quite certain it has no place being on display in a museum about science. Obviously I have no problem with multiculturalism, but I just don't support any ideology getting mixed into science, especially when it uses bad science to make it's case.
The highlight of the trip however, if you measure things by the amount of time my kids spent gawking at one exhibit, was George Rhoads' rolling ball sculpture. I've seen these sorts of things before**, but never in person, and never with fascinated children in tow. It's an engrossing conglomerate of moving parts, a smorgasbord of clinks and clanks, and it kept my frenetic youngsters fixated for over half an hour.
Unlike acupuncture, this moving sculpture actually works, over and over again, without any doubt. At six points around it's circumference children can feed balls into the machine, but whether they do or not the central portion of the apparatus continues to function. It's a huge Rube Goldbergian plaything, a toy that operates both independently of, and interactively with, the kids who admire it.
So I whipped out the iPhone and recorded what I could, the results of which can be seen below. The video's a little rough-around-the-edges***, and I know there's no way you could possibly enjoy it as much as a couple of toddlers did, but I'm sure that you'll agree that it's worth admiring.
Reality always is.
Enjoy!
Also seen on
*Eureka!
**And indeed Rhoads has made many of these sculptures, which are displayed around the world.
***You may not believe it to look at this video, but I used to be a professional cameraman, albeit a lifetime ago. (Well, if you're talking about a dog's life, anyway) Even still, in the time since I've forgotten a lot about how to shoot a scene in such a way that it can be reconstructed into a cohesive 'story' during the editing phase. All of this is just a long-winded and rotten excuse for why there's no establishing wide shot at the beginning of the video to give you a sense of the machine's size. Sorry.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BradBlogspeed/~3/8JTjWDNN5co/my-moving-sculpture-movie
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